Fragile
by Issy
Summary: A one-shot fic from the perspective of James.


A/N: This is a one-shot fic from the perspective of James... and I guess it kinda wrote itself. If you want to read more of my writing, check out 'Bittersweet.'  
  
Disclaimer: If you think I own Harry Potter, you've got another think coming. It all belong to JK Rowling.

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You are the kind of girl that people can fall in love with.  
  
Not in like, mind you. In fact, I can't imagine someone 'liking' you, per se. 'Like' is for the popular, the vapid, the shallow.  
  
You're different.  
  
Different, some would say, is a nice way of putting it. Weird, they call you. Strange. Odd. Dirty Mudblood, the Slytherins say, but I don't think you ever even realised they said it. Or that I punched them for you.  
  
It's your strangeness that lets people fall in love with you.  
  
I've never known one person be so entranced by the simplest things as you are. A candle flame. The sound of the words _'Wingardium Leviosa_.' I found you once on the top of the Astronomy Tower, watching a storm.  
  
You watched the rain fall and lightning crash as, downstairs in the common rooms, the girls people like drowned themselves in Butterbeer and cheap thrills.  
  
You know, I don't think you've ever been kissed before. That kind of physicality seems to be beneath you, somehow. You're too pure, too - unusual. While other go to the Astronomy Tower to kiss, you go there to watch it rain, and to write.  
  
You're so high above everyone else and you don't even realise it.  
  
You are the most wonderfully intelligent person I have ever met. Facts - pure theory - seem to melt into your brain like water into a sponge. Charms; Transfiguration; even History of Magic comes naturally to you, and yet I hardly ever see you pick up a book unless it is a book with sheets of blank paper, where you create the words.  
  
But when it comes to the ways of the world…  
  
... you are as impenetrable to them as the bulwarks of Hogwarts. You are so naïve, so innocent, so far away from me. Untouchable.  
  
And yet... you are vulnerable. As fragile as glass.  
  
The smallest things cut you deeply. The world could be falling to pieces around your feet and you wouldn't notice but if a song or a phrase or a word or a thought touches you, you weep for days. I've known you to be stony-faced at the thought of a world dominated by Voldemort but break down at the death of an ant.  
  
The girls people like probably wouldn't even realise the ant existed.  
  
Your pen betrays you sometimes. Poems spill from it about anything from a glass phial in the Potions classroom to the goddess Persephone. The flow of life is your muse and you are powerless to disobey. You live your life like a yacht on a sea of ink, trying to guide yourself home by mastering the flow.  
  
And yet... sometimes I feel like you're not there at all. You are like a piece of smoke in my hand, drifting away from me. In fact, I doubt you even knew I was there in the first place. To you, I am just James Potter, Quidditch aficionado, Marauder, heartbreaker.  
  
Your heart would be so easy to break, and yet so hard. If someone ever got inside what drives you, ever understood who you really are, your heart would be ice in a flame, melting away in a crystal waterfall. But no-one ever will get inside, because you won't let them. Whether you know it or not.  
  
Inside you're just a little girl and the pettiness of the world is killing you. But you can't stop it, any more than you can stop the inexorable tide.  
  
And so, every day, the girls people like will laugh and indulge in their shallow ecstasy while you sit and let the words pour out of your pen into a poem about the tempest in your mind.  
  
You never let anyone read your poetry, of course - and with good reason. Who would appreciate it? Dumbledore might. Even McGonagall might. But you would never let anyone that deep inside your mind. To you, it would be... a betrayal of yourself. To show it to me... you never would. Because I am who I am. I am James Potter and you are Lily Evans and we are as different as night and day and water and fire.  
  
And so you sit, entranced by the simple beauty of the world as the cruelty of it kills you.  
  
But above all, even when the world seems to be drowning you, you always hold to one thing. And it's the one thing, above all things, that made me fall in love with you.  
  
It's good to be alive.

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REVIEW!  
  
And read and review 'Bittersweet' as well! 


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